The Billionaire Bad Boys Club (19 page)

“I’d rather not.”

Zane stared at the phone in disbelief. “You’d rather not?”

“I like my independence. I need it, if it comes to that.”

“Was I acting like I wanted to chain you up?” His dick twitched with left-field interest in that idea. Rebecca would look adorable shackled to a wall.

“No,” she admitted. She was silent for a moment. If she said it wasn’t him, it was her, he was going to reach through the phone and strangle her. “I just don’t feel
comfortable
with this hookup, given who you are and who I am and the fact that your business partner is my boss. I shouldn’t have let my hormones run away with me. I should have been more sensible.”

“Rebecca, I think—” Zane hesitated, every self-protective instinct urging him to shut up. With an effort, he ignored them. “I think this could be more than a hookup.”

“I can’t,” she said. “Look, Zane, I really have to go.”

And then she hung up on him.

“She hung up on me,” he marveled to no one. He didn’t dial her back. He had sufficient pride to restrain himself that much. He didn’t break out his black book either. Replacement sex with some other woman only would have proved how much realer making love to Rebecca was.

He went back upstairs to dress. Forget taking the boat out tonight. He’d go home. Hopefully, Trey would be in. They’d do something, or nothing, and they’d go to bed together.

He was pulling on his trousers when he noticed what was draped across the back of the bedside chair: Rebecca’s skimpy silver dress, the one that had stopped his heart when he saw her in it on the stairs. He’d bought that for her, to show her how beautiful she was. He was pretty sure he’d succeeded. She’d admitted she couldn’t resist keeping it.

“Fuck,” he bit out.

If she’d left this behind, she truly didn’t mean to see him again.

CHAPTER NINE

Idle Hands

REBECCA
had plenty to keep her busy in the wake of cutting things short with Zane. She pulled her semi-new crew together, putting them through their paces in the fully loaded Lounge kitchen. Her friend Raoul bounced around like a kid in a candy story. Trey’s choice of equipment—and his willingness to buy more—made him her head chef’s new hero.

“Finally!” he crowed. “Everything is how you like it. We’ll throw mud in the faces of those
culos
at Wilde’s Bistro.”

Rebecca secretly hoped so but merely smiled when he said this.

She and the crew tinkered with her recipes: cooking times, temperatures, this ingredient or that. The results Rebecca achieved by herself, with every detail under her control, weren’t the same as what a busy brigade of line cooks produced. Rebecca’s crew was skilled and proud of it. Nonetheless, some needed coaching to reach her high standards. Those who weren’t used to her methods tried her patience, but they worked through it. They all knew consistency was key. They weren’t aiming to be Joe’s Diner. At this level of play, one crappy plate could tarnish a reputation—and forget a crappy night.

Rebecca heard everyone’s input at group tastings, including wait staff and busboys. She wanted them to feel they had a stake in the restaurant’s fate, though it went without saying she had the final word.

If a trial went well, she grew cautiously excited about their prospects. If it sucked, she tried not to dwell on it.

When she went home, it was to an abandoned construction zone. The twins’ friend Jesse had excavated one side of her house and patched the foundation. This was followed by what she believed was called dimple-boarding, repairing the drainage system, and filling the trench again. That done, Jesse’s crew had moved inside. Every night she’d go down to survey progress, hating that she couldn’t tell if the work was done correctly. The basement apartment
seemed
to be moving along okay, enough that she didn’t regret having signed some darned big checks.

As she’d expected, Pete and Charlie’s contribution had only gone so far.

You have to trust them
, she reminded. The twins were young but not idiots. They’d taken their friend’s measure in deeper ways than she could by Googling.

She tried to ignore the fact that the thought of having a boarder in her home made her stomach lurch. Zane had temporarily managed to calm her on that prospect. On her own, she didn’t have the knack.

Zane hadn’t tried to contact her again, aside from shipping the infamous silver dress to her. He’d included a scribbled note in the FedEx box.
No one but you would look right in this
, it said, a statement she was irritatingly unable to interpret. Was the message meant to be angry or romantic? And what right did she have to care? He’d signed the note
Z
, like he was Zorro or something.

One night, Jesse “happened” to stay later than his crew. When she made her usual foray to the cellar, he’d asked her out for a beer. Rebecca turned him down politely, then went upstairs and cried. She knew she’d been stressed lately but, even for her, this was ridiculous. She also knew it wasn’t Jesse she was sorry to have refused. What she did regret didn’t matter. Staying away from Zane was the reasonable choice.

Pulling herself together, she dove into getting the restaurant ready even more determinedly.

~

Trey stared out his office window in a futile attempt to stop obsessing about Rebecca. As he did, their executive assistant knocked on the open door.

“Sir,” she said. “I thought you’d like your mail.”

Elaine was attractive but blissfully uninterested in men. Dressed in a smart brown suit, she set the short stack in his inbox. “The latest
Bad Boys
is in there,” she informed him.

The magazine was more Zane’s baby, but it had been TBBC’s first successful project. Elaine knew he liked to keep up with it.

“Thanks,” he said. “Any plans for the weekend?”

“Gardening,” she answered. “And possibly a movie.”

He didn’t ask what she was growing or which movie. Elaine didn’t invite her bosses to get familiar. Now and then, he and Zane invented stories about her wild secret life, but the truth was they found it easier not to know. Elaine was efficient, trustworthy, and never complicated their lives. Right then, that trait seemed more precious than rubies.

“Mr. Hayworth?” she added before she left. “I sent the list of responders for Monday night to your computer. It looks like most everyone you asked is coming.”

“Good,” he said. “Thanks for doing that.”

Trey didn’t want to think about Monday night, their scheduled preview for The Bad Boys Lounge. If he thought about it, he’d wonder how much Rebecca was worrying, which was sure to lead to wanting to go to her.

Rather than succumb to temptation, he pulled the mail toward himself. Yet another letter from his aunt got fed straight into the shredder. Sending them to his office was her new tactic, one that wasn’t any likelier to entice him to open them. He set aside a business proposal to read later.

The latest issue of
Bad Boys
was next. He did a double take when he saw the cover. A pair of eerily familiar faces grinned at him from the glossy front.

“MEET HOT HARVARD TWINS PETE & CHARLIE EILERT,” urged the headline.

Eilert was Rebecca’s name. Trey’s research had focused on her work history, but he recalled she had younger brothers. What a strange coincidence that Zane’s magazine had picked them as cover boys.

Unable to resist, Trey flipped straight to their interview. His eyes were drawn to a block of text in the middle of a column.

~

“Charlie always was intense,” Pete said jokingly of his brother. “Even at the age of ten. He decided the neighbors wouldn’t be convinced Dad was home for Christmas unless he animated the mannequin we’d dressed up as him. I was recruited to help. I conked out at midnight, but Charlie crawled the floor until daybreak, shifting the dummy from chair to chair. He wore himself out so well he fell asleep facedown in his pancakes the next morning.”

“Rebecca cooked more when I woke up,” Charlie said. “Though she did tease me.”

“She teased you worse when you tried to invent a way for the mannequin to drive us to school.”

~

Trey set down the magazine, blinked, then began again at the start. He was so amazed by what he learned that he went through it twice.

This was extraordinary. Rebecca’s childhood read like a Dickens novel. Mother dies. Father abandons family. Teenage daughter raises brothers while keeping father’s absence secret. No wonder she was uptight. She’d spent a good portion of her life looking over her shoulder.

He’d been right to sense a sympathy between them on that long-ago night at Wilde’s. They were kindred spirits, more than he’d realized.

He rose from his chair, his head buzzing with odd thoughts. Did discovering this about her change anything? Was she less of a soul mate if there was a rational cause for his reactions? He slapped his palms to his brow, barely aware he’d done it. Kindred spirits or no, given his own dysfunctional childhood, could he trust his feelings?

Stop
, he thought. No one could prove soul mates existed or what being one entitled a person to. All Trey knew for sure was that Rebecca called to him. So did Zane, and he valued Zane too much to risk losing him.

He sat and looked at the article again. His hands flattened the magazine’s open pages, a bit too close to stroking them.

He couldn’t think straight—not a preferred state for him. Popping up again, he grabbed his jacket and strode across the hall to Elaine’s nice but small office. She looked up at him startled. The clock behind her said four thirty.

“I’m going out,” he said. “You can leave whenever you’re ready.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, too circumspect to ask questions.

He felt better out in the sunshine. The afternoon wasn’t sweltering, more fall than summer for the time being.

Jacket slung over his shoulder, he walked in the hopes of the exercise settling him. Past the Old State House he went and then down Tremont Street to the Common. The lush green park reminded him how much he loved living here. The people of Boston were a wonderful mix of blue- and white-collar—in every shade of the rainbow. On any corner, he might see ivory tower academics bumping elbows with cops and dog walkers. Trey belonged here as much as anyone.

He crossed the Common with meandering steps, eventually landing on Charles Street. He could check on the restaurant. It was only a few blocks off.

“Crap,” he muttered under his breath. His subconscious had done this on purpose.

She’d be there of course, but so would everyone else, a whole horde of cooks and bottle washers much too busy to speak to him. She’d been training her crew as if their first night were an Olympic event. He could stick his head in, as any owner might. Rebecca didn’t even need to know he’d come.

As soon as he decided, an undeniable excitement fluttered in his stomach.

To his amazement, when he stepped through the door, the only soul in sight was her. She sat in the dining room, sipping from what he thought was a pint bottle of porter.

“Where is everyone?” he asked.

“Sent ’em home,” she said. “We were getting over-prepped. I told them to enjoy the weekend, and I’d see them first thing Monday.”

“
You
sent everyone home.”

She seemed to recognize this was out of character. She poured beer into the glass she hadn’t been drinking from. “Sit,” she said. “Taste. I think this will complement our spin on Boston beans and bacon.”

This was one of their appetizers, served on lace-thin triangles of sourdough toast. Unsure what he was getting into, Trey sat and sipped. “Yes,” he said. “That combination ought to work.”

When she said nothing, he studied her. He was irrationally content to be in her presence, though he disapproved of the dark circles beneath her eyes. She looked thinner than the last time he’d seen her, and she couldn’t afford to miss the weight. That bothered him. This job was supposed to ease her burdens, not add to them.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She let out a ragged laugh. “I had a moment today when I was convinced everything was crap. I honestly thought I needed to toss out every recipe and start again from scratch.”

“Ah,” Trey said. “That’s when you sent your crew home.”

“I wish. I sent them home an hour later after my head chef told me I’d better. When every other word I say is ‘fuck,’ he knows it’s time to rein me in.”

“Smart man.”

“Good man.” She took another swig from the bottle.

“You know, Rebecca, Monday night doesn’t have to be perfect.”

“Sure it does. Trying to be perfect is what keeps me sane.” She said it wryly, but he sensed it wasn’t a joke. Worried, he wrapped his hand on her bare forearm. He didn’t like that she eased away.

“Sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t be laying my doubts on you.”

“Why not? Can’t we be friends as well as employer and employee?” Though he strove to say this lightly, he wasn’t certain he’d pulled it off.

Rebecca’s big gray eyes rose to his. The steadiness at her center seemed to look straight into his heart. Fuck, he wanted her. His cock was abruptly aching, his chest tight with longing to nestle her against it.